CIDA - Accepting Realities

It's no overstatement to say that people "love" Africa. And I don't just mean the tourist class or even NGO workers. Even most of those who criticize aid to the continent, likely Dambisa Moyo herself, care about the remarkable land. They not only feel pity at its suffering, but also remarkable inspiration at the beauty of its people and its vast physical grandeur.But Africa is a challenge, perhaps the greatest in the world. Moyo and others treat it as a kind of formula to be solved (usually involving free enterprise) when it is, in reality, a mystery to come to terms with. In a land so vast and with so much diversity, do we honestly expect there to be full peace among the peoples? We're having trouble just keeping the regions together in Canada.  Do we honestly think that the free market is the solution when some regions are so remote and desperate that no business would ever frequent such areas? Would corruption not be systemic following colonial states, a Cold War and privateer kind of capitalism that bribed its puppets in order to achieve access to resources? How can we account for the effectiveness of aid in Africa when we've never plied it effectively through the remarkable resiliency of African institutions themselves, as primitive as we might find them?Africa isn't Asia, which we often hold out as a key example of how countries grew from being aid-dependent to remarkable prosperity. Of course Asian countries have higher food yields. They have abundant river systems that are sourced in the Himalayas and form the most abundant water system in the world. Think this is a new thought? Consider the great economist Adam Smith's observation in 1776:

There are in Africa none of those great inlets, such as the Baltic and Adriatic seas in Europe, the Mediterranean and Black seas in both Europe and Asia, the gulfs of Arabia, Persia, India, Bengal, and Siam, in Asia, to carry maritime commerce into the interior parts of that great continent; and the the great rivers of Africa are at too great a distance from one another to give occasion to any considerable inland navigation."

Africa depends almost exclusively on rainfall for its growing potential and that resource is increasingly drying up as a result of the climate change caused mostly by the West and its heavy dependency on oil and energy. It is a massive challenge in a continent where the fragility between supply and demand is sometimes measured in hours for survival. Furthermore, as Paul Collier states, poor landlocked countries surrounded by other poor landlocked countries makes developing economies a daunting challenge, unlike anywhere else in the world.Add to all this prime conditions for disease, a lack of any kind of integrated continental transportation system, and a land so vast as to boggle the imagination, and you have a unique situation that calls for solutions other than the conventional kind. It is a mystery wrapped in diverse complexity, and yet critics of foreign aid, like Moyo, forget that nations like Canada and the United States only overcame severe landlocked conditions by constructing railroads, locks, ports and water transportation systems. And almost all of these amenities were funded by governments, not private industry. Businesses will build on an infrastructure system, but only then. Asking Africa to mimic our business and trading impulses while cutting off their rain supplies due to our own participation in causing climate change, or while refusing to set up key transportation hubs, or even irrigation on a grand scale, is like asking 18th-century Canada to enter a world trade system without its own rail grid or dynamic and resourced ports.CIDA, especially in its earlier years, was willing to admit this complexity and ready to take decades to work within that mystery. What's happened? When did that kind of spirit give way to political ideology and simplistic solutions? I want that CIDA back, for the resources for that kind of undertaking yet lie within its employees and its sinew.